Monday, January 16

Request

Probably my favorite gift of the holiday season came from my brother; a VHS tape of the 1988-89 Sonics season. There they were, in all their glory: Ellis, X-Man, Derrick, Soul Glow, Sedale, Alton Lister, Nate, John Lucis, OP, Russ Scoene ... unbelievable.

But what really struck me in watching the video was the point guard talent on that squad. Take a look:

All of which leads me to a request. Does anyone out there know how I can transfer the VHS tape to my computer, so we can upload random bits of the footage? I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd like to see Hakeem take on Michael Cage in a one-punch fight (you've got to see it to believe it), or Derrick McKey throw down over Manute Bol (again, see to believe).

12 comments:

Anonymous
said...

This is kind of a non traditional way of uploading the video. But do you have a Mini DV camera? If you do you can connect the DV camera to the TV or maybe the VCR and hit play on the VCR and hit record on the camera and just have the camera record what you are watching. Then using a firewire cord import it on your computer (hopefully you have mac because that would make a lot eaiser) if you don't have a mac you might not even have firewire. But if you do have a PC you will need a program like Adobe Premiere to important and compress. But if you have a mac you can use imovie which comes on it.

You might get some help from the Northwest Film Forum on 12th and Pike. Or you could rent gear from Glasiers. If you know someone who goes to UW, they have access to gear. Also, there are tons of companies on the Yellow Pages that do transfers...

Thanks for the tips. Here's some additional info, for technofiles:I'm running Windows XP Media Center, 1GB RAM, Firewire and USB2-compatible. Does this mean I can hook something up to the system to do this work?

Ideally, I'd like to connect the VCR to the PC in the same way my stereo is, then run the data from tape to digital.

I work in a media services department, and we do this kind of stuff all the time. It sounds like Merrill has you covered, but you could send it my way as well and get it put on DVD. Putting it onto miniDV also works too.

Let's assume that it does. Paul, how much does it cost to get the gizmo that copies stuff from tape to hard drive, and what is it called? I have a DVD burner as well, so if you guys do a good job in helping me out, a DVD of this tape will be in the mail to each of you.

Lance, thanks for the offer to do all of this for me. My reason for not just sending it to you is that I'm in Canada, and mailing tapes/DVDs across the border means a ridiculous amount of paperwork, for both of us.